Luxury Still Waiting For Stars To Align

Enlarge / ATM at a Patelco Credit Union branch in Dublin, California, on July 23, 2018. (credit: Getty Images | Smith Collection/Gado ) A California-based credit union with over 450,000 members said it suffered a ransomware attack that is disrupting account services and could take weeks to recover from. "The next few days—and coming weeks—may present challenges for our members, as we continue to navigate around the limited functionality we are experiencing due to this incident," Patelco Credit Union CEO Erin Mendez told members in a July 1 message that said the security problem was caused by a ransomware attack.

Enlarge (credit: Getty) About two years after the country’s digital minister publicly declared a “war on floppy discs,” Japan reportedly stopped using floppy disks in governmental systems as of June 28. Per a Reuters report on Wednesday, Japan's government "eliminated the use of floppy disks in all its systems." The report notes that by mid-June, Japan's Digital Agency (a body set up during the COVID-19 pandemic and aimed at updating government technology) had "scrapped all 1,034 regulations governing their use, except for one environmental stricture related to vehicle recycling.” That suggests that there's up to one government use that could still turn to floppy disks, though more details weren't available. Digital Minister Taro Kono, the politician behind the modernization of the Japanese government's tech, has made his distaste for floppy disks and other old office tech, like fax machines, quite public. Kono, who's reportedly considering a second presidential run, told Reuters in a statement today:Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Enlarge / Tops of citrus sodas at a manufacturing plant. (credit: Getty | Vincent Mundy) After more than five decades of limbo, the Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday revoked the authorization of brominated vegetable oil (BVO) in food, banning an additive long known to have toxic effects that is already banned in Europe, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and California. BVO—simply vegetable oil that is modified with bromine—has been used in foods since the 1920s.

Enlarge / Artist's illustration of the COSI spacecraft. (credit: Northrop Grumman/European Southern Observatory (background image)) A small research satellite designed to study the violent processes behind the creation and destruction of chemical elements will launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in 2027, NASA announced Tuesday. The Compton Spectrometer and Imager (COSI) mission features a gamma-ray telescope that will scan the sky to study gamma-rays emitted by the explosions of massive stars and the end of their lives.

Enlarge (credit: SOPA Images / Contributor | LightRocket) OnlyFans' paywalls make it hard for police to detect child sexual abuse materials (CSAM) on the platform, Reuters reported—especially new CSAM that can be harder to uncover online. Because each OnlyFans creator posts their content behind their own paywall, five specialists in online child sexual abuse told Reuters that it's hard to independently verify just how much CSAM is posted.

Enlarge / Robert Wickens looks out from the cockpit of the Formula E GenBeta test car in Portland, Oregon. (credit: Formula E) Formula E provided flights from Washington to Portland and accommodation so Ars could attend the Portland E-Prix. Ars does not accept paid editorial content. PORTLAND, Ore.—The timing of Robert Wickens' life-altering crash at Pocono Raceway in 2018 could hardly have been more cruel.